“A phrase begins life as a literary expression; its felicity leads to its lazy repetition; and repetition soon establishes it as a legal formula, undiscriminatingly used to express different and sometimes contradictory ideas.”

— Felix Frankfurter

Concurring, Tiller v. Atlantic Coast Line Railroad Co., 318 U.S. 54 (1943).
Judicial opinions

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "A phrase begins life as a literary expression; its felicity leads to its lazy repetition; and repetition soon establish…" by Felix Frankfurter?

Felix Frankfurter 67

American judge 1882–1965

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

“If an object is pleasant, repetition will increase its charm; if it expresses sorrow or pain, then repetition will intensify its melancholy. On the contrary, any subject that is peculiar or unpleasant will be made unbearable by repetition. So repetition always acts to increase intensity. Since the time that this principle of harmony was employed by the primitives, it has been visually lost, and so forgotten. One strove for the charm of variety, and so achieved the destruction of unity... Variety is just as much an element of beauty as parallelism, provided that one does not exaggerate it. For the structure of our eye itself demands that we introduce some variety into any absolutely unified object... To be simple is not always as easy as it seems... The work of art will bring to light a new order inherent in things, and this will be: the idea of unity.”

Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918) Swiss artist

another source of his 'parallelism' concept is Hodler's letter, written in 1904 to de:Franz Servaes; in which Hodler explained his design principle of 'parallelism', later adopted by the Vienna Secession artists. The Leopold Museum in Vienna discovered and owns this letter
from: Die Kunst Ferdinand Hodlers, 1923

“But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.”

D.H. Lawrence book Women in Love

Source: Women in Love (1920), Ch. 15

“I am very conscious of the fact that our feelings and strivings are often contradictory and obscure and that they cannot be expressed in easy and simple formulas.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1940s, Why Socialism? (1949)

“Only repetition with a goal in mind can truly lead to mastery. Sometimes you can keep rehearsing without learning anything new.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“Today, music heralds… the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.”

Jacques Attali (1943) French economist

Source: Quotations of the Day: September 2003, https://www.bartleby.com/quotations/092003.html

“The difference between the arts arises because of the difference in the nature of the mediums of expression and the emphasis induced by the nature of each medium. Each means of expression has its own order of being, its own units.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Painting and Culture' p. 57
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“It goes on, terrifyingly repetitive. One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.”

Kóbó Abe book The Woman in the Dunes

Part 2, Ch. 24
Source: The Woman in the Dunes (1962)

“The thing that struck me most was the way he stuck to the motif [in the 'Flag' and 'Target' paintings by Jasper Johns ]…. the idea of stripes – the rhythm and the interval – the idea of repetition. I began to think a lot about repetition.”

Frank Stella (1936) American artist

quote, 1960's
Quotes, 1960 - 1970
Source: The New York school – the painters & sculptors of the fifties, Irving Sandler, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1978, pp. 215-216

“Expulsion from Paradise is in its main aspect eternal: that is to say, although expulsion from Paradise is final, and life in the world unavoidable, the eternity of the process (or, expressed in temporal terms, the eternal repetition of the process) nevertheless makes it possible not only that we might remain in Paradise permanently, but that we may in fact be there permanently, no matter whether we know it here or not.”

Franz Kafka book The Zürau Aphorisms

65; a slight variant of this statement was later published in Parables and Paradoxes (1946):
The expulsion from Paradise is in its main significance eternal:
Consequently the expulsion from Paradise is final, and life in this world irrevocable, but the eternal nature of the occurrence (or, temporally expressed, the eternal recapitulation of the occurrence) makes it nevertheless possible that not only could we live continuously in Paradise, but that we are continuously there in actual fact, no matter whether we know it here or not.
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)

“A phrase begins life as a literary expression; its felicity leads to its lazy repetition; and repetition soon establishes it as a legal formula, undiscriminatingly used to express different and sometimes contradictory ideas.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Felix Frankfurter 67

Related quotes

Related topics